494 TALKS ON t£ AT THE FEET OF THE MASTER "
for liberation is muwukshatva.^ It means, practically,
to be in a condition of desiring liberation.
The question, by the way, has ofteti been asked
whether this moksha, or liberatioti, is the same as
Nirvana. No, clearly it is not. There has been a
very great deal of misunderstanding about all these
terms. The European Orientalists went always by the
exact meaning of the Samskrit—I mean the derivation
of the word. You know how often a derivation
misleads, because, when a word enters into a langu-
age, it is taken up according to the spirit of that
people, and they often give it a new meaning. You
get quantities of words in English which are derived
from the same thing, yet have a different meaning.
The word ^fact5' comes from the 'La^.mfactum—a
thing which is done ; the word " feat " comes from
exactly the same thing but through the Norman
French, it is the same word as tt fact??; " fact" and
t6 feat " are the same, and yet we use them with
different meanings. But if, because they are derived
from the same Latin woTd, you took them as mean-
ing the same thing it would mislead you quite seriously.
It is the same with the Samskrit. To take exactly
the cut-and-dried meaning of a word from its de-
rivation is misleading. We have an instance of that
in .the word cc Nirvana/' which means cc blown out "
The idea is that the consciousness of man is blown
out, like flame, and that there is nothing left. Orient-
alists constantly use that as a sort of explanation
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